AlfaPeople | SCA
Manufacturing
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Business Needs
Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA) is a Swedish consumer goods company and a pulp and paper manufacturer. It produces and distributes global hygiene products marketed under several brands including Libero and Libresse. SCA was founded in 1929; today it has more than 44,000 employees and sales totalled €12.3bn in 2015. With its main product portfolio consisting of personal care products (wet wipes, baby nappies, feminine hygiene products, tissues and cotton-pads), plus publication papers, solid wood products and forest-based biofuel, SCA is considered one of the world’s largest companies in personal care products, the world’s third-largest tissue supplier and one of Europe’s most profitable producers of forest products. SCA is also Europe’s largest private owner of forest land, with 2.6 million hectares, equivalent to the size of Macedonia. It sells its products to customers in countries all over the world, with the largest markets in Germany, UK, USA, France, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Australia, Mexico and Belgium. SCA’s ambition is to grow and strengthen its positions in both mature and emerging markets by broadening its product categories, product ranges and services, as well as entering new segments and channels.
In order to grow its business, SCA continually ensures that the business has the right IT infrastructure and partners to scale with them. In August 2012, SCA began its working relationship with and introduced support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM from AlfaPeople. Now an established partner, AlfaPeople has been fully integrated into their IT department. It handles support issues from SCA’s international community of 2,500 CRM users and delivers more than 4,200 hours of end-user support each year. Eva Lechner, Manager User Education & CRM Project Manager at SCA said: “AlfaPeople is responsible for providing us with support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, dealing with 2,000 users to manage and dispatch the cases. The customer communication provided by AlfaPeople is best in class. The team is highly trusted by our end-users and our IT department. Their team works in a very efficient way, respecting our internal processes in the area of service management and development.”
Recently SCA required some help to manage an expansion of their CRM solution, as the in-house IT support department did not have capacity to execute the project in full. SCA naturally turned to AlfaPeople to project manage and resource the work, enhancing and developing Dynamics CRM as well as providing ongoing maintenance and support for the current live version of the solution. AlfaPeople’s role was also to act as a link between SCA’s internal support and development teams, providing a high quality of support to users of the CRM system. The vast majority of support cases are currently solved by AlfaPeople, providing standard user-help over email or Skype and screen sharing. In cases where the result is a bug, a thorough root cause analysis is undertaken – if necessary looking at individual lines of code – and a comprehensive problem report with a proposed solution is produced and sent to the SCA IT development team.
As part of the expansion project, AlfaPeople would also be required to ‘buffer’ all the extra work requests sent to the in-house development team. This added interface in the request process would allow the development specialises to prioritise the right functionalities and expansions to Dynamics CRM that would allow SCA to meet its overall business objectives.
Solution
To ensure that the project and ongoing partnership was efficiently run on a day-to-day basis, AlfaPeople seconded a team of fully-dedicated and highly-qualified support consultants into the existing structure of the SCA IT support department. Located in a remote office, they worked using the same systems and solutions as the rest of the in-house support department, supporting a common vision to drive value through the use of world-class IT solutions.
A high quality and frequency of communication and a well-organised support function are the two primary factors that were outlined as critical to the success of the implementation. AlfaPeople’s support team committed to delivering user support within an agreed response time, in line with the in-house team’s own SLA and subject to the same expectations from the overall business. This team has direct access with all relevant internal teams including the Helpdesk, the development function and it inputs into weekly status reports. All these factors mean that AlfaPeople has deep understanding of SCA and the common user issues – and can escalate to Microsoft should it be necessary. Eva Lechner, Manager User Education & CRM Project Manager at SCA said: “We are very happy to continue working with AlfaPeople and are preparing for future challenges together.”
Benefits
The intended goals were clear from Ahlers’s initial ERP search, and Microsoft Dynamics AX has delivered:
IT resource to rely on
Thanks to the quality of support provided by AlfaPeople, SCA has a trusted service that it can turn to for ongoing help and to reliably manage Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s features and changes, all with a stable cost-base. The relationship and division of work between the in-house team and AlfaPeople means that resources are allocated and assigned to take advantage of everyone’s skills, with the SCA team focused on developing solutions that enable a competitive business edge. This approach has created a positive reputation of Dynamics CRM within SCA, accelerating user-adaption and empowering them to use it correctly.
Allowing the IT development team to focus on developments
The relationship with AlfaPeople means that the internal IT development team can concentrate on driving the business forward, expanding the solution with both features and increasing adoption and scalability with new user-groups. This focus has not only boosted the productivity of the development team – lowering the direct cost of new implementations and resulting ROI – but also reduced the likelihood of the need for new development projects, as the management and processes connected to existing operations are already in order.
Class-A IT support for users
The user support service that AlfaPeople provides to SCA’s business owners has created a high-performing and centrally-controlled technical hub that resolves tasks efficiently. This includes importing, exporting or resolving large volumes of transaction data, which users expect to be handled with the same high level of response. Overall the AlfaPeople team provides SCA with an agile and dynamic support operation, where everyday business is handled to an efficient ROI and an excellent service quality.
